CHAPTER 27
1970
THEY’D BECOME CAPTIVES OF THEIR OWN CONSPIRACY.
Interminable nights. Days passed as a bellyache. Barricaded within an apartment devoid of charm in bland North End Montreal, on nondescript Avenue des Récollets—working-class without the patina of age, modern, bereft of style—the James Cross kidnappers were fearful of anything that twitched beyond their booby-trapped doors. Their sole entertainment derived from listening to neighbourhood children play, and switching channels, hoping to hear news of themselves.
Soon, winter would bind the kids indoors.
And they weren’t on the tube anymore. Outings were restricted to foraging at a corner dépanneur or running errands to pick up packets of cash scrounged by sympathizers. Supporters they’d relied upon for money had been rounded up in the random sweeps, so they developed a second tier of contacts. Risky. Their nerves were shot, their collective will sunk.
Walls inched closer. The ceiling crept down as they slept.
Fresh and stale sweat mingled in their airless rooms.
In her bed at night, the lone woman perpetually wept.
They had each craved the publicity their grand gambit created, and had come to depend upon their anonymous notoriety. Now the press had been muffled by the War Measures Act, and attempts to garner more attention—letters dictated for the hostage to write, criticisms of the government—ceded no intended result. On most days, nary a soul, it seemed, nor the soulless government, gave a hoot.
Their morale slumped deeper into depression as none of the three predictable consequences to their actions—capture, killing James Cross, or being slaughtered in a shootout—interested them.
The man Cross had come to depend upon—the others called him Jacques whenever they forgot themselves and mentioned a name, which had become more common of late—had been infuriated by Laporte’s murder. That gave Cross a paltry hope. The kidnappers lost their course of action, their impetus. Now they prepared for capture. Would capture mean jail? A shootout to the death? Or a flight into exile?
Polls charted the growing support for the federal government and Pierre Trudeau. How could this be? Off shopping, the woman overheard a stranger remark that the FLQ ought to be machine-gunned against a wall. The cashier suggested burial alive. In line, the anonymous kidnapper smiled at the suggestion, as though she tacitly agreed. I am buried alive already. Nobody wanted a second murder, unless it was a member of the FLQ swinging at the end of a taut, gristly rope. Everyone wanted the crisis at an end, the soldiers off the streets, the FLQ vanquished from their lives. For the kidnappers, their dreams of revolution ended. Their beloved Front de Libération du Québec, that imposing title, had been reduced to another pack of absurd, irresponsible boys in the public’s craven mind. They once yearned to emulate the experience of Algiers, at least as they saw the revolt there portrayed in a movie called The Battle of Algiers, yet experience had demonstrated that Quebec was not North Africa, that their revolution would never become the movie they once imagined.
From the lonely well of his room, Cross listened to his captors’ whispers. They spoke in hushed tones, often bitterly now. Where once they professed conviction and resolve, now they bickered amongst themselves, trying to sort a way out. They were coming undone, unglued, which did not bode well for him. He presumed that, aside from their primary reluctance to kill him, he was kept alive because he constituted their ticket to freedom—their escape hatch. When the police came, which they now believed was inevitable, they’d trade his life for passage to Cuba. He was all they had left. No more dreams or ideals, no revolution. Just Jasper Cross, their prisoner, and Cuba, their hope.
In recent days, discussions concerned only escape. On a foray for supplies, one of their number returned with groceries and beer, but he also popped into a travel agent. He showed them a flyer. Initially, his comrades were furious about the detour. If they couldn’t go out themselves, they didn’t want him gallivanting around town like a tourist, or an ordinary citizen. And yet, Cross overheard them comment one by one on Cuba’s white sand beaches and the pink open-air haciendas in the publicity shots. They were dreaming of another place, another life. Their hope in the future shifting.
Cross thought them mad. A government that would not negotiate when it did not know where they were would not negotiate once it had them surrounded. But he left them to their reveries. He was done trying to talk sense in this house.
The potential manner of his death disturbed him the most. He dreaded Laporte’s experience—strangulation by wire. The indignity, the horror of losing his life in the vile grip of a lesser man’s hands made him squirm against his restraints, and when he despaired, tears moistened the back of his blindfold.
He thought he’d silently cried himself dry, but he hadn’t.
He would prefer, when the time came, to be shot. Once, he had been on the brink of saying so. “If you need to kill me, then please, shoot me.” He rehearsed the plea in his head and nearly uttered the words aloud. Surely, he could appeal to their humanity to grant this one frail mercy. At the last moment, he successfully resisted the impulse. Saying those words gave his captors a convoluted permission to kill him. That satisfaction, that approval, that willingness to assuage their guilt by allowing them to bequeath his final request—he’d deny it to them. Even if it meant that, in the end, he endured the terrible agony of the wire.
The thought caused him to soak his sheets at night.
So be it. He’d die badly, if necessary. He’d not give them any hint that he condoned their actions against him. He would hate them—the woman who had made his ordeal so unbearable and the others equally, forever, whether his life was long or short. He might die, but he was not willing to surrender.
Always a struggle, though.
His worst moment had come after Laporte was butchered. The national television network, the CBC, reported that his own body had also been located. He was watching TV and the announcer, listening to a report through an earplug, told the world James Cross was dead. Then advised that the report was inaccurate. Then declared that, no, he was dead after all. Cross knew his wife would be listening to that broadcast, that her heart would wail as her mourning took hold.
Another terrible moment followed, when the letter dictated to him by his captors and written in response to the broadcast had been analyzed by reporters, also on television. He had deliberately misspelled a few words, tricking his French captors with his English, and the journalists had deduced—in public, on television—that he was trying to get a message out. The Cross message, they pronounced, had indicated, if nothing else, that the words were not his own, but those of his oppressors.
Who did those reporters think they were talking to? Did they not know that the FLQ had ears? That they fastened their eyes to every broadcast? The FLQ is listening, you pricks. They’re watching. They’re sitting right beside me. Damn you! The ignominy of that betrayal. His captors hauled him back to his room and denied him television privileges. For a few days, no one talked to him and they fed him less. The woman came into his room at night and woke him with a stiff shove to his chest. She berated him until her husband dragged her back to bed, then he returned to apologize. “It’s the stress,” he said. Stress? Stress? Do you want to talk about stress? Have a chat with my wife. Left alone, he felt so helplessly betrayed by those reporters that his body reeled from an internal, dull, wretched nausea.
A glimmering despair.
How despicable could this world be? Those damned reporters. Why did he have to suffer for their wanton stupidity? He fell into a more egregious tangent. Are reporters working on behalf of the terrorists, tipping them off deliberately? Is the whole nation conspiring against me? That worry provoked a new, untapped wellspring of anguish.
Lately, his captors were sensing that the end was near. He’d been bound up and either blinkered or blindfolded for almost sixty days. Perhaps they craved the finish, too. His imprisonment had become their own. He had noticed an incremental improvement in the household’s food rations. Cross doubted that they had tapped a fresh supply of cash, money being a constant irritation among them. Instead, they were burning through their resources more quickly, spending more on beer, as if they no longer counted on a lengthy siege. As it happened, one was out shopping and two others were preparing breakfast when a fourth, Cross guessed, had peeked around a back curtain.
“Flics,” he whispered.
Cross felt his bones congeal.
His comrades, apparently, ran from the kitchen to see for themselves, but saw no one. But where had the children gone? They always played in the street—now they were absent, their voices silent. The captors couldn’t confirm seeing cops. But still, they were beginning to feel police around them. As if they could sniff them. Was this what paranoia felt like? Flics, gazing back at them through the bathroom mirror, listening devices embedded in their clocks and radios? Although they did not know that flics had taken up residence on the third floor of the building in which they lived, and across the street also, they could feel them everywhere, like stains on a wall, dust motes scurrying on the floor as they walked, as if the echoes of their own steps were being recorded and measured.
This is how it happened.
Anik Clément took a seat in the rear booth of a restaurant on Jean-Talon Street, in the Greek neighbourhood of Park Extension. Within eight minutes, she was joined by Émile Cinq-Mars. They had little to say, having recently chatted at length. Cinq-Mars dared to place his hands over hers, to comfort his former girlfriend, and she did not pull hers away. He broke the intimacy only when Captain Touton entered and peeled off his hat and overcoat, which he hung on the hook next to their booth.
“Crappy weather, eh? Only December. Just the beginning. It’s a sin to live in this climate,” he groused, then sat down. “So? How’s it going, Anik?”
She was reaching into her substantial handbag. “I have a couple of leads.”
“Leads?” Touton snapped back. “I was expecting more than leads. I was expecting you to take us straight to the kidnappers. Patrolmen are standing by.”
She looked up, both hands still in her handbag, and demonstrated that she would brook no guff from him tonight. “I could follow these leads myself, if you like, then take you by the hand to the kidnappers. Or, you could do your job and follow up the leads in a tenth the time it’ll take me. It’s up to you. Let me know by midnight. After that, I smash my glass slippers and go to sleep drunk.”
He studied her. That stubborn look. “All right,” he relented. “Show me your leads.”
“You’ve neglected the women,” she advised him. “Wherever there are men, there are women, even in a war. You’re right to have Jacques Lanctôt’s picture in the papers, but I take it you haven’t located his wife and son?”
“We’re looking.”
“She’s pregnant.”
“I see.” He nodded, taking that in, although he didn’t see how it was of any immediate use.
“Do you? Check out the birthing hospitals to see where she’s expected to deliver. Find the physician who’s treating her. But first, look at this.”
She placed a large black-and-white photograph down on the tabletop. Touton was staring at the snapshot of a young boy when the waitress came by. He ordered a coffee, and the other two indicated that they’d appreciate a refill.
“This is the son?” Touton asked.
“Boris, yep,” Anik told him. “Now check this out.”
The second photograph was of an older woman, somewhat rotund, wide in the hips, with an ample bosom and a shy moon face. Beside her, at her hip, stood the lad Boris.
“Who’s this? Somebody’s Ukrainian grandmother?”
The next snap showed a man entering a second-storey home by the back entrance.
“You showed me this before. It’s not the hideout?”
“This is where the babysitter lives. Boris is living with the babysitter. Among the women in my circle, she was known as a good sitter. So I put a photographer up a tree to guard her back door. Sometimes, Jacques goes to see her, we found out, but Suzanne, that’s his wife, she goes more often.”
“Which Jacques?”
“Lanctôt. Keep up, Armand.”
“So we can wait there for Jacques?”
“That might not happen again,” Anik cautioned him. “When he arrived this one time, in the picture, he had to talk his way in. I don’t think it’s a common visit, I’m saying. Put a tail on the babysitter. She takes the boy on excursions. Mostly to the local park. When she does, expect Suzanne to visit, at least once in a while. I guess she’s just too busy right now to look after the boy full time.”
“Busy? She’s a kidnapper?”
“I’d say no. But a courier? Probably. Does she go to the hideout? Likely.”
Leads never got much better.
“Next thing. Like I said, you’ve neglected the women. You have Jacques Lanctôt’s face in the papers, but you don’t have his sister’s, Louise.”
“His sister?” Touton hadn’t heard of a sister.
“You see? I know the women. Louise is Jacques Lanctôt’s sister and Jacques Cossette-Trudel’s girlfriend. I noticed that her name didn’t show up on the lists Émile gave me of people you’ve put in jail. Which makes no sense. I would have put her on the top ten of any list. She was radicalized years ago, she’s committed. More so than people you have behind bars. So where’s Louise? I think she’s married, actually, but in any case, she uses Cossette-Trudel’s last name. We call him C.T.”
“Holy shit,” Touton sputtered out. This changed a few things. It helped.
“It’s about time I got a reaction out of you. Do you know the Taverne Boucheron, Captain?”
“Of course.” On rare occasions, he went there himself to enjoy a few glasses of draft. Back in the good old days, he’d followed more than one perp into the establishment to see what company he chose to keep.
“Stake it out.”
“Who and what am I looking for?”
“It’s a rendezvous point. C.T.’s favourite spot. Always was. Apparently, that hasn’t changed. Here.” One more photograph. Of Cossette-Trudel emerging from the Boucheron Tavern.
“Who does he meet there?”
“Sympathizers. Doctors. Lawyers. Pipefitters. Men with cash—the ones you haven’t rounded up yet. Couriers.”
This was gold. Touton couldn’t help but smile. He wanted to say that it felt like old times, meaning that part of this experience invoked those days when he had worked with her father and mother, but he thought he’d be better served keeping that opinion to himself.
“Thanks,” he said.
He could tell that she was a bit proud of herself, but the moment was not about satisfaction. She turned away, unable to be fully content with her work.
After downing their coffees, they were each set to depart in different directions. This time, Anik did meet the captain’s look. She held his gaze quite steadily. Then she turned, kissed Émile’s cheeks, and tore off.
They watched her go.
She was almost running by the time she went through the door, and she got her handbag jammed up. She wasn’t accustomed to carrying one, and had to free herself to get loose.
“Good work,” Touton told his protégé.
Cinq-Mars merely shook his head. Nothing accomplished here felt remotely related to police work. “You’ll keep her out of it?” he asked. “She doesn’t want any of this coming back on her. I’ve made that promise, that it won’t.”
Touton didn’t need to treat a young cop with such deference, but these were brutal times. He’d never lived through anything like it. They were engaged in the largest manhunt in human history, and today the two of them were on the brink of cracking it wide open. Yet neither man would ever receive credit. That was the price to be paid to broker this deal.
“We’ll pass along Anik’s tips to the Mounties.”
“How come?”
“For her security. This way, none of the people who break the case will know where the good juice came from. They’ll say it was from Montreal cops, and laugh—think we were too lazy to follow up on the leads ourselves, maybe too dumb to recognize their value. Our force will have to eat more shit. But Anik stays secure this way, and the job gets done, because a few of those Mounties do good work.”
“They might not listen to you. They might think a tip from a Montreal cop can’t be worth a plugged nickel.”
“First off, it won’t come from me. They’ll take me too seriously. Later on, they might mention that it came from me, and we don’t want that. So you tell them. You’ll look like a dumb lunk for not knowing you had a good tip. You aren’t worth mentioning because you’re too junior. Then I’ll follow up, to make sure the news gets checked out. Émile, we’re going to get these guys. We’ll put a stop to this.”
Nodding, Cinq-Mars pulled on his woollen overcoat. For close to sixty days, the city had been in torment. “That’s our job. It’s good to finally get it done.”
His captain clamped a hand over his near shoulder and gave it a good hard squeeze. Cinq-Mars could feel the man’s legendary strength in that grip, not all of it lost to the passage of time. “A case like this could make your career, set you for life. You don’t mind giving up the credit?”
He shrugged, then pointed to where Anik had gone. “Keep her safe. I mean it, Captain. That’s all the credit I need right there.”
Yves had been away, and was overdue. He strolled down the block with his usual loping stride, oblivious to the world, and rang the bell of their street-level apartment. Inside, the men detached the dynamite booby trap on the door and admitted him.
“They didn’t stop you?”
“Who?”
“The flics! They’re all around us.”
“You’re imagining things.”
They booby-trapped the door again. Later, the lights went out. After that, someone trespassing on their lawn tried to turn the water off to their building. Yves pointed his M1 at the intruder and told him to bugger off. The man scampered back to the other side of the street, fearing he might be shot in the ass.
So now it was official. They were under siege.
Then the phone rang. They were expecting the call. The woman answered and listened, then suddenly hung up.
“It’s not only the flics.” She spoke calmly, quietly. She’d been crying in her bed lately and getting angry at odd moments, but now she could not fake surprise or show emotion. “The army’s here, too.”
“‘We have you surrounded.’”
They did not run to the windows to check. Instead, they seemed to observe a minute’s quiet, although the time could not have lasted that long. To Cross, the interval seemed endless. He detected a change in the atmosphere, a charge. Suddenly, he was the most powerful person in the apartment, no longer the weakest. Before they spotted cops, someone had gone to fetch him water and had left the door open. Blindfolded, he saw nothing, but he listened through his pores for any indication of news. Had the woman really mentioned cops? The army? Was something going on? Was he dreaming? Then he heard the boots of the heaviest man pound across the kitchen floor, towards the window. The venetian blinds rattled slightly as they were parted. Then they shook again, as if suddenly pushed back. Cross tried to see every sound he was hearing and visualize the silences.
The man said, “Shit.” In his inflection of the word, Cross registered sorrow.
The phone rang again, and they all jumped.
“Should we answer it?”
It buzzed a second time.
The woman answered again. “We have demands,” she said.
She remained quiet.
“What the fuck’s he saying?”
“Wait!” She listened a little more. Then she hung up the phone.
“What did he say?” the man asked, quietly this time.
“He said they don’t want any more violence, nobody has to get hurt, we’ve all been through enough, it’s time to give up peacefully. The usual cop bullshit rhetoric. He asked for our demands.”
“Read the fucking manifesto!” one guy said, but his companions failed to goad him on. Manifestos read over the airwaves were hollow gestures now.
“What did you tell him?” one guy asked, and even Cross wanted to slap him awake.
“You were in the room, weren’t you?”
The phone rang again.
“I’m answering this time.”
“Why?”
“Why is it always you?”
The man who answered was the one who had gone to fetch Cross his water.
“Yeah?” he said, and listened. He put on a snide voice. “You don’t need to know who you’re talking to.” A moment later he repeated, “You don’t need to know that.” He still sounded as though he wanted to pick a fight, but the next time he spoke, he was subdued. “Yeah, so? That’s me. So?”
“Don’t tell him that,” the woman hissed at him.
The man suddenly shouted into the phone, “No, asshole! You listen to me. We want a plane to Cuba.”
“Holy shit,” another of their number said. This was feeling real to him.
“That’s right. We got Cross in here. We’re prepared to kill the fucker. A bullet between the eyes, maybe one in each eye. You want no more violence, get us a fucking plane.” He waited for a response. “Yes, he’s still fucking alive, do you want to talk to him?”
He walked straight to Cross, but the cord got stuck in the door. The woman yanked it free again.
“Tell them who you are,” he demanded, and thrust the phone against the side of his captive’s face.
“This is Jasper Cross,” he said. He realized suddenly that these were the first words he’d spoken in his own language in two months. He wanted to bawl. “I’m all right.”
The man stomped back to the kitchen. “Get us a plane or we’ll have a shootout. Cross goes down first, then a few cops.” Suddenly, he bellowed to one of his pals, “Get away from the fucking window! Do you want to get shot?”
“Give me the phone,” the woman demanded. Apparently, her colleague acquiesced, because she spoke next. “Who the fuck am I talking to?” A moment later, she spit out, “You don’t need to tell me about my fucking language, pig! I’ll say whatever the fuck I want. No, you calm down.” She took in the caller’s response and shot back, “Go fuck yourself, all right? I’m not talking to you. I’m not talking to any fucking Mountie…. No! I’m not going to put the other guy back on. You talk to me, only it won’t be you. You guys want to talk to me, put somebody on from the SQ or a city cop, then call me back. We’re not talking to Mounties in this house.”
She hung up.
Quietly, somebody said, “Fuck.”
Another man said, “Somebody calls back, says he’s SQ. How will you know? He could just be a Mountie saying he’s SQ.”
“There’s TV cameras,” a man said.
“Get away from the fucking window. I’m not going to fucking tell you again.”
Someone slammed a tabletop, then kicked a wall.
The woman was pacing, her clicky shoes tapping out a rhythm on the floor. “That’s how we’ll do it,” she said. “Television. They’ll have to show us who we’re talking to.”
“That’ll work,” someone said.
“No, it won’t,” another man said. “The power’s off. Anyway, we still won’t know who we’re talking to. We’ll be talking to some guy. That’s all. Some guy in a suit. We won’t know who he works for.”
“That’s true,” the woman conceded.
“Does it matter who we talk to?”
“I’m not talking to any goddamned Mountie. I’m a Quebecer. It’s humiliating! I’ll only talk to one of our own.”
“Mounties can be Quebecers, too.”
Now she was furious. “Don’t talk to me about those turncoat pricks. I’m not talking to a Mountie and that’s that. I’m not talking to one of Duplessis’s goons, either. That’s not a legitimate government of the people. A city cop. That’s it. That’s all. That’s the only flic who can negotiate for their side. You don’t like it? Go fuck yourself!”
“Calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to fucking calm down.” Cross could almost see that she was speaking through clenched teeth. “That Mountie shit said that to me.”
“Okay, look,” another man interceded. “She’s right. Mounties, they take training in negotiations. We don’t want to talk to somebody like that.”
“Make it some cop we’ve seen before. We’ve seen some guys on TV. Pick one of them. That way we know who it is.”
“What about Touton? We know what he looks like. It’s probably bullshit, but he’s got a reputation for integrity.”
The phone rang again and the woman picked up. She listened. “We changed our minds…. No, you’re wrong, I can do that…. Well, I’m sorry, but I didn’t know you were dropping by tonight. Maybe we’re not fully prepared.” She waited a longer time before she spoke again, and when she did, her voice was low and threatening. “We’ve got James Cross in here, alive. We’re willing to kill him. Now, listen to me … NO! You listen to me right now. We don’t want SQ. All those old SQ guys were handpicked by Duplessis to be his thugs. We’ll negotiate with a city cop. Armand Touton, that’s our guy. Don’t call us back until he’s on the line. We want to see him on TV, so turn the fucking lights back on.”
They were pleased with that episode. They felt they’d won a round.
“Now what?” somebody asked. Cross strained to listen. He was confused for a while, as were his kidnappers, but he gathered that big searchlights now shone on the exterior walls of the building.
“Don’t worry about it,” somebody suggested. “It’s only for the TV cameras.”
“Are you kidding me?” the woman shot back. “It’s for the goddamned snipers.”
They caught the commentary of their demise on television.
The five sat on the kitchen floor as army sharpshooters took aim at their apartment bathed in bright lights. In the distance, a perimeter of spectators formed, and they saw for themselves that no one demanded their freedom. The atmosphere verged on the festive. People were having fun, sharing jokes, waiting and watching, and probably a portion hoped to witness a bloodbath—some kind of action. They wanted to be nearby if the kidnappers fell in a rage of bullets and dynamite.
They wanted Bonnie and Clyde, the movie, but just the ending.
A hail of bullets.
This could look like war.
Behind the barricade, a TV reporter conducted people-on-the-street interviews. A few people spoke of their sadness that “the boys” had been caught. “What about me?” Louise had demanded of the TV set, then laughed, although a twinge of bitterness could be detected in her complaint. In his room, Jasper Cross, bitter also, thought to himself, Yeah? So what about you? Nobody’s sad that you’ve been caught, and inwardly laughed at his private joke.
One wizened old guy said that the cops should blow up the house and be done with the nasty business. “What about James Cross?” the reporter asked, and in his darkened chamber, Cross thought, Thank you, sir, for asking that question. At least there’s one journalist left with half a conscience. The old geezer teetered, perhaps in a drunken stupor, and waved his hand at waist height as if polishing the hood of a car. He was fighting for his words, then concluded, “Blow them up!” The reporter moved on, guessing that the old guy didn’t really understand the question.
The phone kept ringing. They kept answering. The Mounties were right on what they said about that. They weren’t going to shoot James Cross just because the cops made a phone call, now, were they? So the Mounties won that one. They could always take their phone off the hook, but the cops said that Captain Armand Touton was on his way. If that’s who they wanted to talk to, then he’d be the guy. But they had to be patient. Give him time to cross the city. He couldn’t fly, now, could he?
They knew how long it took to cross the city. He should have arrived by now.
“While we’re waiting,” the woman said, “you should be getting a plane ready for us. We need lots of fuel. If you won’t give us a plane, then pick out a coffin for your precious Mr. Cross. If you want, you can hear his preferences—what kind of wood and all that. I’ll get him to write you a list.” She hung up. Her voice sounded tired, her responses half-baked. Cross sensed her defeat. He presumed the Mounties could sense it, too. He didn’t know if that helped his situation, or not.
Then the Mounties called to say they should select an intermediary as well. Someone to be a runner between them and Touton.
“How come?”
“Because we’re cutting the phone line now.”
“Don’t—”
The line went dead.
Each of them took turns listening to the silence on the line.
No dial tone.
“They’re punishing us,” one of the men said.
“For kidnapping Cross?”
“For cutting them out of the negotiations.”
“I need to go to the bathroom,” Cross called out.
“It’s the excitement,” somebody muttered.
“Keep your pants on,” the woman called through to him. “I’ll take you.”
One more humiliation before they were done with him.
She told him the news. “They’ve cut the phone line. We need an intermediary. A go-between, to talk to their go-between, whom we named for them. We got more go-betweens than we got hostages.” His piss flowed out of him while she listed all their troubles.
“You only have one hostage,” Cross reminded her. “Me.”
“That’s it. We got to take good care of you from now on.”
They threw a message out the window in a cardboard cylinder they took from a roll of paper towels. Mistaking it for a stick of dynamite, the nearest cops ran away. Inside the house, they had a good laugh over that. For an interval, a measure of their stress dissipated. The cops crept back and picked up the message, and seeing them so tentative and frightened was good for another laugh.
Captain Armand Touton waited outside in his car and once more leaned on the horn. This time, it had an effect. Émile Cinq-Mars dashed out the door of his second-floor apartment. Then braked on the stairs, scooted back up, locked the door properly, and scampered all the way down the stairs again. He went around to the side and got in the front passenger seat, surprised that it was just him and the boss.
Touton slapped a flashing magnetic cherry on his rooftop, and they were off at high speed.
He didn’t tell Cinq-Mars where they were going, and the young cop didn’t ask. Along the way, the junior officer asked him, “Why do you want me there, anyway?”
“You’ve been watching the news?”
“Who hasn’t been?”
“I’ve been asked to do the negotiating.”
Cinq-Mars could not contain his surprise. “You? By the Mounties? Why?”
“Not Mounties,” Touton snapped. “Would that make sense?”
Cinq-Mars was confused. “I didn’t think so. Then who?”
“The terrorists. Who else?” He spoke as though he did not expect the young man to believe him.
He was still confused. “I didn’t know you knew them.”
The senior cop shrugged. “Neither did I. But they like my style.” He smiled. “A lawyer, his name’s Bernard Mergler, he’s the go-between, but I negotiate for our side.”
They carried on, fast, pell-mell, slowing for intersections, but barrelling through them the moment other cars caught his flashing light.
Cinq-Mars returned to his original question. “So why do you want me there?”
“Somebody has to bring me coffee.” He honked at a bus and got it to move over. “Which reminds me.”
“What?”
“Give me back my badge. The next time you want to come out on the job with me, wear a uniform.”
Émile Cinq-Mars was a detective no more. But he was still a smart cop. He told Touton, “I’m not here to bring you coffee. I know what I’m here for.”
Touton kept driving, but looked over at him a few times. Eventually, he bent his head down and back up again, as though to concede the point unspoken between them. “I may need you to talk to Anik.”
“I know.”
The prime minister had chosen to watch the proceedings from his official residence at 24 Sussex Drive. Gérard Pelletier kept him company and interceded whenever the Justice Department called.
“We’re going to close this out,” Pelletier assured him, much relieved.
Television commentators were asking police officers how the discovery of the FLQ hideout had occurred. The cops talked, their lips were definitely moving, but they weren’t explaining much.
“How did this happen?” Pelletier inquired.
Trudeau didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “Remember the Cartier Dagger?”
Pelletier nodded.
“That’s the price I paid.”
The secretary of state took in the news, observing his old friend for any untoward reaction, or any reaction at all. “Should I ask?”
Trudeau shook his head. “You won’t get an answer.”
They both watched the tube awhile. Then Pelletier noted, “Expensive, no?”
The prime minister dug a hand down the middle of his back to give himself a serious rub, working out the stresses there. Then he shrugged. “Not if this works.”
A while later, thinking politically, Pelletier posed another question. “If you can’t tell me the reason you’re letting them go, how will you explain it to the public?”
He delivered another of his famous shrugs. “The Brits put pressure on me to free their guy. In the end, I decided that his life was worth a lot more than the pleasure of incarcerating his kidnappers. If someone wants to know if I was negotiating with terrorists, I’ll just say that the British made me do it.”
“The Brits are tough. If they made you do it, then it had to be done.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
The old friends smiled. A few minutes later, evaluating everything, Pelletier assessed the situation with a positive nod. Fair enough. If it had been his decision, he’d probably do the same thing. Get the hostage back. Say good riddance to the rest. Nobody needed the kidnappers around being heroes in their prison cells, and Trudeau had already abolished the death penalty. Just get rid of them.
“This is a tough country to hold together,” he opined.
Trudeau looked over at him briefly, then back at the TV. Pelletier had always been a master of understatement.
Touton walked the long distance across the street. He remembered a day, years ago, when he flushed a syphilitic gunman from his home by tossing stones into one room after another until he showed himself. If the terrorists opened the door a crack for him, they first had to defuse the dynamite, then he could crash it down. He had the strength. His reflexes might be suspect, but if his legs performed to an old standard, he’d be on them so fast no shot would be fired. The kidnappers would be face down, their hands behind their necks, before they had a chance to blink. If they did blink, they’d be in handcuffs, wishing they’d never sipped mother’s milk.
Still, he had Cross to worry about. Something to keep in mind.
Anik telephoned after Cinq-Mars had gotten in touch through a clandestine exchange. Touton ordered everybody out of the command truck to talk to her. “Mounties might be listening,” he warned. “I can’t be sure.”
“Okay,” she said, “I get you.”
“I’m going over there, to talk to the kidnappers in person.”
“I’ll see you on TV,” she told him, and laughed a little. “I’m watching now.”
“I’ll try to remember to fix my tie.”
“Don’t wear your hat,” she advised him.
“My hat is my trademark.”
“That’s true. All right. Wear your hat.”
He exhaled. “I need to know something.”
“What?” Her voice was tentative, worried. She’d made a few tough decisions lately. She didn’t need to make another.
“Somebody you once knew—I’m saying it this way because the Mounties are listening—he wanted the object to go into the right hands. What he considered to be the right hands, anyway.”
“I believe that,” she said.
“Not the fascists, or the commies or the unions, not the Church or the government—but into what he considered to be the proper hands. He might’ve been right, he might’ve been wrong, it’s not for me to say. But he wasn’t looking to make a quick buck, even if he had some deals cooking. I think it’s fair to say that.”
“I don’t have any deals cooking,” she said.
“Because that might’ve been his downfall.”
“I’m looking to put the knife into the proper hands.”
“That’s what I’m asking, I guess. Because it’s fair to say it’s been in the wrong hands before. And for too long.”
She needed a moment to think. “I’m not taking it from the man who has it to give it to the man I used to be sleeping with, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“It’s a concern.”
“Those two have to fight it out on their own. They’re big boys. They have to get by without any props.”
“All right. I guess what I’m asking is—”
She waited for him to say it. When he didn’t, she provoked him. “What? You think I have my own FLQ cell now?”
“I want to know that you’ll look after the knife. That it’ll be your decision. Not somebody else’s. Just yours. You, I can trust. But if you’re being manipulated, or coerced, or influenced—”
“It’ll be me,” she said curtly.
“I don’t mean to insult you.”
“No? You’re doing a pretty good job of it.” He could hear her breathing become calmer. “It’ll be me,” she said. “On that part, you just have to trust me.”
“I wanted to know. Before I go over there.”
“I’ll be watching,” she said.
“Maybe I won’t wear my hat.”
“Yeah, it’s the seventies already. Nobody wears hats anymore. You should change your style.”
Touton smiled as he crossed the street, knowing that commentators on television would be wondering what amused him so much. Other cops standing around looked aggrieved. This one was smiling. He wasn’t wearing his hat, so his face was easy to see on the cameras, and that must mean something. One analyst mentioned that he had never seen the captain without his hat. Probably, he suggested, it was a way to help put the kidnappers at ease.
They made the absence of his hat a turning point in the negotiations.
He entered the building. A man spoke to him from behind the door to the first-floor apartment. As if he was reading his mind, or recalling his reputation, the man warned, “We got a gun on Cross. Try anything, he’s dead—like that.” The young fellow snapped his fingers, and Touton decided to forgo any heroics. On his rickety legs, he’d need better odds than those he was facing now.
“Don’t put ideas into my head. We just want to get through this negotiation. I understand it’s hard. But you brought me in here because you figured I’d be a stand-up guy to talk to, right?”
“We want to stick it to the Mounties. Keep them out of the picture.”
The comment made Touton chuckle. “You’re doing a good job. They’re peeved. Us Montreal guys, we appreciate it. We’ve had a few bad turns during this manhunt. We haven’t come across so well. So it’s nice to look like we can walk and talk at the same time.”
The man inside also chuckled. Then he asked, “What did you want to tell me that you couldn’t tell the lawyer, Mergler?”
“Bernie’s a good guy. Trust him. Some secrets are secret though, you know what I mean?”
The man said he didn’t have any idea what Touton meant.
“Getting you on a plane to Cuba has been authorized by the prime minister of Canada. He talked to Castro himself to make it all happen.”
“That’s nice if it’s true. How do I trust you? How do I trust him?”
Touton realized the man was sitting on the floor, so he slumped down as well. There were three apartments in the building, two of which were above them. For more than a day, a cop had been residing on the top floor, with a make-believe wife, in a place borrowed from a school crossing guard.
“In the course of this investigation,” Touton said, “we found something out about our Mr. Trudeau. About a lot of people, if it comes down to that. But we’ve got something on him, that if it comes out, he loses the next election.”
“Oh yeah? What?” This was unexpected, a carrot tossed into the stew.
“I can’t tell you that,” Touton said. “The truth is, I don’t know. But somebody who does know will talk if Trudeau doesn’t keep his word to you guys, if he doesn’t make the flight to Cuba happen. He’s aware of the situation. He knows it’ll all come out if he lets us down. Trust me. He doesn’t want the embarrassment.” The policeman adjusted his sitting position, becoming more comfortable, which was meant to indicate to the man inside that he was being more trusting himself. “Anyway, you should understand this: he wants you out of the country. He doesn’t need any of you becoming martyrs—that’ll only make his problems worse. He doesn’t want you sitting in jail cells, either, becoming folk heroes. We don’t want people writing songs about you. You want to know why you’re going to Cuba? Because you’re holding James Cross? Don’t believe that. Hey, if you were just a gang of bank robbers who’d taken a hostage and it was just you and me, I’d have raided by now. I’d have smashed the door down and taken my chances. ‘Fuck the dynamite,’ that’s what I would say. ‘Just go get ‘em.’”
“Try it,” the man inside threatened.
“I won’t,” Touton thrust back, commando-style, hard and fast, as he was trained to do—only not with his fists this time, but with words. “Why won’t I? Because nobody wants another killing, and because I have my orders. We all do. Nobody wants you dead, sir, and nobody wants you in prison and nobody wants you in the system. You think going to Cuba is your best answer? Guess what? It’s everybody’s best answer for you.”
The man inside was quiet awhile, but Touton could tell that he was thinking. Something told him that more than one person had been listening. Probably the terrorists were exchanging hand signals, and Touton was vaguely tempted again, because he knew that they would have taken their fingers off their triggers. But that was an old self speaking to him, powered by adrenaline and instinct. Given the state of his knees, and his present position down on the floor, in any assault he’d need about thirty to forty seconds just to stand up. Some charge that would be.
Then the guy stipulated what he had been waiting to hear. “Send Mergler back and we’ll work it out. Listen, I don’t want a bunch of Mounties escorting us. That would be humiliating. City cops. Only.”
“It’ll be mostly city cops,” Touton promised. “We’ll escort you through the streets. A Mountie or two, and some SQ will ride along. Please, don’t say that can’t happen, because, to tell the truth, I’ve got enough headaches right now without going through that discussion with them.”
“One more thing,” the man inside said, without disputing what he was told. “How come there’s all those plainclothes cops outside, walking around with red armbands?”
“Two reasons,” Touton told him. “In case of a shootout, they want to be able to identify who’s a terrorist and who’s a cop. If I were you, I’d wear a red armband. You’ll be safer.”
“What’s the other reason?”
“They want to scare you, because the truth is, nobody wants a shootout. So far, that’s worked.”
“I’m not scared,” the man said, but who on this earth would believe him?
“I am,” Touton told him.
The man inside locked the door again, and Armand Touton pushed himself up to his feet, groaning a little from the pain in his legs. Then he went outside and crossed the street.
TV commentators noted that he was limping on the way back. One suggested that the legendary captain of the Night Patrol might be showing his age, and he and his partner beside him chuckled into their microphones over their mean zinger.
Back in the command truck, Touton told the go-between, “Bernie. Good man. Go. Do your lawyer thing. End this.”
In Canada, only the queen of England on an official royal visit could command such a motorcade. Marc drove his relic of a Chrysler, the one in which Cross had been kidnapped, his foot heavy on the gas. A replacement car was driven along behind in case his broke down. Twenty-two motorcycles and eight cars raced through Montreal towards the island named after Champlain’s child bride, Île Ste.-Hélène. Streets along the route were closed to traffic, with cops waving the entourage through the intersections. Thanks to live television coverage on every channel, the route was lined with the curious, as if for a parade. In this instance, rather than welcoming a monarch, they were watching kidnappers flee the country. Tens of thousands stared as they sped to the makeshift Cuban consulate at sixty miles an hour, while the rest of the country watched their history on television.
The process seemed very Canadian—polite, without drama or fanfare. In the former Canadian Pavilion from Expo 67, temporarily designated as Cuban soil, the kidnappers surrendered their weapons and Cross was taken into Cuban custody. He said goodbye to none of them, and shook only Cuban and British hands, no others. The terrorists waited, then were joined by Lanctôt’s wife and child. She was close to giving birth, so a physician would accompany them on the flight in the event that a delivery became necessary.
They enjoyed, and had negotiated to assure, TV coverage. The cameras helped guarantee their safety and, they believed, helped advance their cause throughout the world. That satisfaction took a bad turn. They deposited suitcases in the trunk of Marc’s rickety Chrysler, and now could not open it. “The damn lid’s jammed.” Rather than make a spectacle of themselves on international TV, trying to break into their own car and possibly failing, they abandoned most of their belongings. What they had taken in the back seat, however, across a pair of their laps, was the big old television they watched so intently over the previous sixty days, and they lugged that into the Cuban embassy, all set for passage. They would not be arriving in the Caribbean without a few trappings of home. They would bring what was most important, for sure. Their revolutionary gear. A few books. Their TV.
Once they were in the hands of the Cubans, they were off the airwaves. For posterity, and for broadcasts later that evening, film of their departure was made, but live coverage had been concluded. A military Sikorsky helicopter took them to the city’s airport, where, as they waited on the tarmac, they horsed around a little. They boarded their aircraft, a Canadian Forces CC-106 Yukon, fitted out to transport dignitaries, in silence.
Inside, they briefly broke the tension.
“Hey! We’re going in style.”
“Like princes.”
“Like presidents.”
“Like kings and prime ministers.”
“Like queens.”
“Like revolutionary heroes.”
Were they that? They didn’t know.
Their plane—Military Flight 602—rose unobserved into the sky above the city of Montreal, and above the province of Quebec, and as the land fell away, they soared among the sparse clouds, pleased that they had killed no one, but also that they had saved themselves. The men and women wondered about the others, those who killed Laporte, guessing that they were observing their escape on television, for they did not know that their friends were hiding out in a tunnel dug beneath a barn thirty miles from the city. From there, they’d be flushed a few days after Christmas to face a rowdy trial and imprisonment. Those who had not killed continued to rise above the land and took succour in hopes they’d see those friends again, or any friends, and those with window seats noticed that, below them, the higher landforms had whitened with the advent of winter.
They cleared Quebec skies, heading south.
Onboard, C.T. was thoughtful. His girlfriend slept fitfully in the cradle of his arms. Whenever she awoke, she looked around, then wept, then curled more closely into him again. She was already missing her homeland, already dismayed by exile.
He had learned some things, he knew. He had learned that he was no terrorist. Che, his hero, had talked about becoming a killing machine, but he wasn’t one and wanted no part of becoming one. He told Cross one time that they planned to let him go after a few days of captivity, and his cell would have done so, except that Laporte was kidnapped, too, and that changed everything. Then Laporte was murdered, and that changed everything again. Che had never talked about what to do when you discover that you’re not a killing machine, and didn’t want to become one, either.
So, in the end, they weren’t killers. Consequently, neither were they revolutionaries. They committed a revolutionary act and affected history. But they discovered other dimensions that embodied who they were, and they were not people who killed middle-aged British diplomats, no matter what their cause. C.T. had seen his colleagues change during the action. Jacques grew into their leader, directing that Cross not die. That made him their leader, because they were thinking the same way, yet Jacques had the courage to state it, to instruct the others accordingly. Initially, Marc was their leader. He was ten years older than anyone else, they had followed him, but now Marc followed the others and did as they decreed. Yves, who was passing himself off as Pierre Simard and held a passport in that name, was the only one among them from the upper classes. He embraced his new life, his new identity, but he was not a killing machine, either. None of them were made of that material. Had they been, the only man to die in the previous months would not have been a fellow Quebecer, while the English captive walked free. Under the pressure of the time, they found their true selves, and uncovered strength, and fortitude, and the substance and supremacy of their own humanity, their own care for life. They uncovered the courage to follow through on a newly determined objection to violence.
Which surprised them all. Astonished them all.
In committing a violent act, they discovered themselves to be peaceful. That irony was almost overpowering for C.T.
He was sad, too.
They had made history, in a way. They’d stirred the pot. He worried that they were now celebrities after a fashion, that books would be written, documentaries filmed, and he would probably be identified as the stutterer, the young one who tripped over his own words. People might laugh at how he was portrayed. He’d been through a lot, though, more than anyone knew, including those who went through it with him, even Louise. He helped keep her together, as she was wired pretty tightly. He supported Jacques against Marc and helped Yves from getting too depressed, from bolting, as Yves was inclined that way. He kept Marc feeling that he looked up to him, because Marc needed that, having thrown away so much to do this action, not least of all his wife and family. So C.T. knew he had contributed, and as the youngest among them he was not finishing this episode as the weakest, or the least valuable. In the end, he was stronger than when he began. Throughout the two months, he continued to read the same books that so influenced his life, so opened his mind to injustice in the world and to change. He again read Che, Mao, Pierre Vallières, sometimes out loud to Cross, but increasingly his analysis was different, the context altered. He began picking holes in the philosophy. Mao maintained that violence created a necessary repression by the government. Repression instigated an uprising among the people. And C.T., having hours to kill during which he merely watched over Cross and mused about things, thought, The role of the revolutionary is to make the people suffer so that they will rise up. We did that. People are suffering under the War Measures Act, and we brought that on. But when you break it down, doesn’t that mean that the role of the revolutionary is to be an enemy of the people? If the revolutionary is to be an enemy of the people … then I’m an enemy to my own people. When did I sign up for that?
Life was more complex, he was discovering, than he previously believed.
Starting out with this, he had been young. He was still young. His heart, and a small voice, told him that that was his gravest sin. This conclusion made him sad, yet made him strong, as well. He and the other Jacques did not speak of these matters, but he could tell, he just knew, that the other Jacques also felt and experienced similar changes. Despite his unending love for the spotlight, to be on TV, the other Jacques had grown as he had grown. When Marc said to them, “Nous vaincrons,” they didn’t repeat it back to him anymore. The words sounded hollow now. Even a little silly. They were not defeated—he still believed that they might conquer, but not in any way that Marc intended. He’d rather be useful somehow.
Cuba.
Exile.
As they touched down on the tarmac in Havana and shuffled off the aircraft to commence their new, ungainly lives, far away, in Montreal, Jasper Cross was released from Cuban custody to resume his old life again, although to a posting perhaps more secure than Canada.
They began their new lives in Cuba. No sooner were they settled than they sold their TV. Their faces weren’t on it anymore.